Vila in the 1970s

No photos - sorry! 

My wife and I lived in Vila (now Port-Vila, I know!) for three years 1972-75. I was Manager of a Trust Company called Investors Trust Ltd; she worked for Burns Philp's travel agency. Well, I'm not sure it was an actual travel agency, but she used to meet incoming planes and persuade tourists to take bus tours during which she commented on sights of interest. Later, she was the secretary to the Peat Marwick representative. We are still in touch with the Moore Stephens man and his wife, in Sydney.

We now live in the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean, and I have a blog called "Barlow's Cayman", which is accessible via Google. I have just posted a short and light-hearted essay on our time in Vila ("Phoning Princess Margaret"), which gives just the slightest of hints of how things were, back then. The post makes reference to an earlier post, "Aiding and abetting adultery in the South Pacific", which also gives a taste. There are brief mentions of The New Hebrides (as they were called then) in other posts, but those are incidental only - occasional paragraphs on cricket, the John Frum phenomenon, the local pidgin... All light-hearted stuff, and irreverent, mostly.

We loved our time there, and remember it fondly - despite the malaria, and the theft of our land after independence!